September 14

I turn on the lights. Outside, the morning dawns. A cloudless sky. It’s cool. I wear felt slippers and a cotton cap, sitting at my desk and making green signs of ink on white paper. Writing.

I breathe.

I think.

I take a deep breath.

And I feel how thinking prevents me from making signs on paper. It prevents me from writing.

Writing does not come from thinking. But from the movement of the hand. Thinking blocks movement. The movement becomes freer the less I think. The movement becomes freer, the more I leave the movement to itself.

There are people who set their hand in motion through thinking. They write down what they think. Others set their hand in motion by feeling. They write down what they feel.

However, it is always memories that set the hand in motion. The reminder of how to make the signs. The reminder of what the signs mean. And the memory of what hasbeen experienced, what has been read, what has been eaten, what has been seen, what has been perceived.

And the memory of the parents.

Or the forgetting the parents.

One of them is always there, when writing.

From all this comes writing.

From what the writer is, writing arises. From the perceived, from the remembered, from the absorbed. And from feeling. Or from thinking. Or from both. And from the movement of the body, from the movement of the hand. And not just the hand. The whole body is in motion while writing. Except when I cross my legs.

The writer always expresses himself. Hopefully. Only then is it a writing of truth.

Some succeed in expressing more than themselves with writing. They make signs, and in the signs, in the words, in the sentences, something else is expressed. A different part of the world than the writer´s self.

For example, signs, words, sentences that describe another person. For example, signs that reshape what is perceived in such a way that something new is created. Something that no one has noticed before. Something that no one has expressed before.

Or something that had been forgotten. There was a time when many knew it. Now everyone else but the writer has forgotten.

Someone who writes brings it out of himself and thus brings it back into knowledge, into memory.

And by returning to knowledge, by being able to read it, to be absorbed by other people, it becomes available again. It can be perceived again — after having been transformed by memory and by writing. And so it becomes available again, for feeling, for thinking, for acting.

For example, what the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico wrote in the eighteenth century can be perceived again. He wrote that the beginning of all knowledge is the knowledge and thinking of oneself. Not the knowledge and thinking about things, as René Descartes put it. Vico wrote a humanistic philosophy based on man.

Everything had been forgotten.

Until someone reads about it. Until he or she perceives what had been written long ago, absorbs it in his or her self. And it transforms. The reader transforms it by feeling something while reading, while thinking something, about what was perceived while reading. The reader turns what is written into something read. He brings what he has now read into connection with memories, with what has been read before, with himself. And in this very moment he transforms all this into movements of the body, of the hand. And through the movements he makes signs on paper or on the computer keyboard. He writes.

From what has been read, remembered, and from what has been eaten and drunk, and from what is perceived and from the parents — because all this is present in the writing EGO — a text is created. And from the text a book is created. And the book, for example, has the title “The New Art Of Autobiography”. Then it is the book of Emma´s uncle Williard Hunter. Or it’s titled “Pedigree”. Then it is the book by Patrick Modiano.

And it’s all this: language.

Last weekend we celebrated; I celebrated the birthday of Williard Hunter. The completion of his hundredth year of life was celebrated. How much was remembered, how many memories were gathered in the Café of the Toledo Museum of Art?

It was the memories of about eighty people.

One man had memories from more than a hundred years. Williard.

Another person had memories from a few weeks. The newly born daughter of Evelyn and Jamar, she is a great-granddaughter of Williard.

Some had a lot of memories, even of a lot of memories of reading. For example, Bernhard Nickel. The philosophy professor from Harvard, who gave a kind of keynote speech.

Others had memories of little. For example, me.

And from the sum of all the memories in this hall in the Café at Toledo Art Museum emerged: glances, encounters, touches, spoken, heard, worde and the sound of voices.

Encounters arose. Conversations ensued.

New, more memory was created. The memory of this Sunday in Toledo.

This text was also written based on memories from this event.

And at some point, maybe someone will read this text.

And from all the eaten, drunk, spoken, heard, felt, smelled, seen, tasted, from the read, the remembered and from all the parents of those present and from the memories of them, something new unfolds.

But that’s not really new.

Because all the components of the new were already there before.

It is only new for a moment, for the moment when it is first read, perceived.

During the time of this morning´s writing, it has become brighter outside.

I will now turn off the light again.

I turned off the light.

And I keep writing.

It is 7:21am.

For a few days now, I don’t wake up at 4am in the morning. This kind of insomnia is over. I wake up around 6am now. Writing has helped against insomnia. Writing further helps against insomnia. Writing makes me sleep longer. Writing makes me less awake.

The banal, the triviality of writing.

The complete insignificance.

What is important is not the writing, certainly not the written, the text. Important is the transformation of the EGO into the movement of the right hand.

And what is even more important is the better life. Life with more sleep. And the life that allows me to look at the fully written notebooks.

The beautiful feeling at the sight of these notebooks.

The feeling that I exist.

And keep writing. Don’t think. When thinking, the movement of the hand stops. Different from William Hunter I can’t turn the reflection into text. It’s impossible. My thinking, my reflection is more like clicking around on the smartphone or zapping on the TV. One image follows the other. I forget the time. I forget myself. After ten minutes of zapping or clicking or thinking, I don’t know what I’ve done, thought, felt during that time. It’s like unconsciousness. It is a time of the unconscious.

That doesn’t have to be bad. But it leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction.

Isn’t it good to be unsatisfied? Would I rather be satisfied? I can’t get away from the idea that this feeling is related to being sexually satisfied or being sexually unsatisfied. And then I remember the negative verdict, the condemnation of the word and the state of “being satisfiedt” by my father-in-law. He said that one should never be “satisfied”.

During zapping, clicking, thinking, during this meaninglessness, during this unconsciousness — not being satisfied. Rather immobilized, switched off, stunned. And when it’s over, when I realize how pointless I spent the last few minutes, there comes the dissatisfaction. On the other hand, satisfaction comes, for example, when I have written three pages in the morning. Regardless of whether they were any meaningful characters that I wrote on paper. Or whether they were meaningless characters, just numbers or word repetitions or word repetitions or word repetitions.

I notice that now I have written the word “word repetitions” without stopping with the fountain pen. Because writing without discontinuation is better than writing and constantly discontinuing the fountain pen. If I remember correctly, I wrote in block letters for many years. I kept dropping the fountain pen. After every letter I had written. At some point I discovered — again — that it can be written with connected letters.

Perhaps this was the moment of conversion to myself.

In any case, it was part of the conversion to myself.

How can you write in b l o c k l e t t e r s ? H a v e I r e a l l y d o n e s o ?

Are there old records, old postcards on which I can verify this? What a terrible writing: in block letters. A writing that wants to prevent the ME from getting on paper. An attempt to dissolve. To dissolve into neutrality and knowledge. This is how someone writes who is not with himself. Someone who doesn’t have his own handwriting. Someone, who does not want to use his own handwriting, who does not want to show it — his own handwriting. Someone who doesn’t want to show himself. Not in the handwriting and probably not otherwise.